Serverless Superhero

This week our serverless superhero is none other than Ran Isenberg, cloud system architect at CyberArk and AWS Community Builder. If his name sounds familiar, that’s probably because you’ve read a number of his articles. Ran has been writing a series, AWS Lambda Cookbook where he’s been setting forth best practices for the serverless community. He also has a wealth of open source content on GitHub that shares his expertise. Thank you, Ran, for your continuous effort to make the serverless community a better place.

Tutorials

If you’ve been dragging your feet like I have on getting started with the CDK, Maciej Radzikowski helps make it an easier pill to swallow. He goes through his hesitations, findings, and analysis of his experience with it in his blog post this week. Definitely worth a read to help you decide one way or another.

Matt Martz dives real deep real fast in his post about inferring architecture and async workflows using EventBridge events. This is a super cool post where Matt builds an app that observes event traffic and uses it to build a timeline. I can see this being super helpful not only in a production debugging scenario but also for a “live documentation” point of view as well.

In a continuation of his series on serverless sustainability, Sheen Brisals delivers us some gold about sustainability of data. It talks about the data lifecycle, why it’s important, and the different options you have based on your storage type. This post really makes you think about what you’ve built and the environmental impacts it has simply based on the data fetching and storing.

We all have the goal that serverless is for everyone. But practically speaking, that’s easier said than done. This week I (Allen Helton) wrote about serverless enablement and why it is important. The secret? Start small then spread the love.

AWS AppConfig popularity seems to be on the rise. As features continue to be built out, like feature flags, the viability in a serverless environment goes up. Jimmy Dahlqvist shows us how we can use AppConfig to determine Step Functions workflow. His post is a step by step tutorial for how you can configure a workflow that listens to feature flags. This has tremendous value for features or enhancements in progress!

Database

DynamoDB streams are a great way to kick off async processes. Haiko van der Schaaf walks us through how they can be even more useful by filtering events coming to the stream. This enables you to move entity filtering out of your Lambda function handler and into the trigger, potentially saving you big on cost if you’re only trying to process one type of entity in a single-table design.

New Releases

SAM users rejoice as SAM Accelerate is now generally available! It supports syncing your local environment to the cloud, builds nested stacks, and even tails CloudWatch logs in your IDE! This is a very exciting release and gets us one step closer to normalizing local development in the cloud instead of on your machine.

Spotlight

It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of serverless. It is still buzzword-y and the barrier to entry to your first “hello world” is remarkably low. Every now and then we need someone to tell us how it actually is, and Daniele Frasca does just that. He covers what he views as the state of AWS serverless development in his post. No stone is left unturned as he describes how development used to be and how it’s different with serverless. Very grounding read.

Last Words

We had some great content this week from some exceptional writers. Tooling is getting better. We’re learning about how to enable serverless teams. Things are trending upward for the community. Exciting times are coming and you all are continuously making it better with your contributions.

If you’d like to make a recommendation for the serverless superhero or for an article you found especially useful, send me a message on Twitter, LinkedIn, or email.

Happy Coding!

Allen